At least you don't challenge either facts: that the Pope approaches Orthodoxy with charity and good will and that Orthodoxy most often responds with nastiness and grief.
But I think RKBA Democrat has it right.
The Holy Father is doing what is right because it is right and because Our Lord asked it.
By doing this he is saying: This is what we are about.
And the nasty response he always gets, and that so many Orthodox people on this site chime in with, is saying: This is what we are about.
Thank God I'm already in the Church I want to be in.
There is nothing about the Orthodoxy I've met on this board, your own posts chief among the exhibits, that even remotely resonates with the high priestly prayer of Jesus: "that they all may be one."
Orthodoxy, at least in the USA, still strikes me as primarily a group of disgruntled converts from other denominations who, maybe a dozen years ago, didn't like Prayer Book revision and who now are re-fighting the Fourth Crusade and calling the Ecumenical Patriarch a heretic for not keeping their new-found church as strict (and as anti-their old church) as they'd like it to be. Of course, it's still "episcopalian": i.e., a plethora of bishops, with no functioning primus inter pares, grouped in various mutually-non-recognizing Synods arguing over jurisdictions, with the converts resting easy only because at least there are no female acolytes or women priests (which obsession is an entire Weltanspraung in itself!).
The whole thing strikes me as bizarre, kind of an alternative hobby, really, for people who don't like stamp-collecting or model railroading.
"The whole thing strikes me as bizarre, kind of an alternative hobby, really, for people who don't like stamp-collecting or model railroading."
Orthodoxy does not = the people who post at FR. I think your comment quite apt as applied to the people who post here, including yours truly, but I certainly would not confuse any one of us with any religion. You can tell where we come from, ideologically, and also detect our personal strengths and weaknesses sometimes, but that only tells you where to begin.
If you really want to find out what Orthodox is all about, there is only one way to do it and that is by doing it, i.e. by spitting on your current heresies and becoming an Orthodox Christian catechumen. Any number of Roman Catholics who have gone before you will tell you it was rough going in, but a great and a joyful relief once it was done. Finally, for the first time in their lives, they were able to really concentrate on theosis. And theosis, after all, is what it's all about or should be.